That’s correct MM. How many sins did Adam and Eve commit, before they stood condemned? One. Just one. They didn’t commit murder, or abort their baby. They didn’t assault anyone, or commit adultery. They just ate the fruit, but that one, little, seemingly innocuous sin, immediately condemned them to Hell, unless they had a savior.
No doubt some people think one can be truly saved, and use that as an excuse for wickedness. I think that is what the natural man of 1 Corinthians 2:14 thinks. It’s not true, of course. If a true Christian DOES fall into sin, they could end up like Ananias and Sapphira. Only God knows for sure, whether they were truly saved or not. I tend to think they were, but got taken out, for lying to the Holy Spirit.
Well, Jesus is more than fire insurance.
And HE knows who's sincere and who's just trying to use Him to see what they can get away with.
The attempts to discredit salvation by faith just because SOME people might think they can sin with impunity and still get to heaven doesn't work.
Heck, they don't let the actions of their pedo priests discredit Catholicism and yet they posit hypothetical scenarios and demand we pass judgment on whether that hypothetical person is saved or not.
It does not build a case against salvation by grace without woks, but just reveals that the person who thinks that way could not have been born again.
Nobody who has the Spirit of God in them would have that mindset towards sin.
People who are not saved simply have no concept of the change in one's thinking towards sin in the person who is regenerate, who has the Spirit of the living God in them.
Romans 6:1-4 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Romans 6:12-18 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
Romans 7 details the struggle with sin that the believer has.
Nope, sinning wantonly is not an option for the believer.
Not to mention that GOD will not allow any of His children to continue in blatant sin like that.
Catholics treat God as if it's all our responsibility to avoid sin and God is a disinterested, disapproving, distant, hands off entity, who just sits up there with a scorecard, shaking His head, and ticking off *Yup, he did another one.*
They do NOT see that God has any active involvement with His own children that HE chose to redeem.
God will not let us continue in a self-destructive path but will actively intervene to protect us from ourselves and save us from ourselves.